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Pipe Organ library

Hi all!

I am planning to buy a pipe organ library, would love to hear some comments and suggestions from you!

Mostly probably I will need a more lyrical and "religious" (soft, calm, solemn and whatever you can describe ) quality more than a dramatic / tutti colour. Right now I have 2 libraries in mind ; PMI Baroque Organ & Peter Ewers Symphonic Organ [SOS-2].

So I would like to hear if you have used these libraries before and whether one of them will suit my usage? Or if u have any other recommendations too please!

Re: Pipe Organ library

I love the PMI Baroque Organ. Michiel really captured this instrument beautifully. There is very little background noise even on the quieter stops (background noises on quieter stops has been an issue with other pipe organ libraries I've purchased). I have heard that the symphonic organ (I do not own it) has a powerful and magnificent tutti but doesn't really have a lot of useful stops and combinations. Do a search on this forum for the symphonic organ. At any rate I would highly recommend the PMI Baroque Organ.

Re: Pipe Organ library

Originally Posted by leogardini

The best one in my opinion www.orgona.org , for all kinds of musics!!!

I agree with Leo, and highly recommend Notredame de Budapest (www.orgona.org). It is very good featuring great gothic hall reverb and I find the sound inspiring. Check them out online - I think they have a sample you can download.

Re: Pipe Organ library

Thanks a lot!

For some reason the NDB organ website link isnt working, but i checked it at soundsonline.com already. Yes it sounds real nice, but it seems its too dramatic for my use hehe, since I am gonna use it in some works which sound as if they are played in a small chapel or even a school hall LOL, the natural reverb of the NDB organ seems too much for that purpose.

I guess i will go for the PMI baroque organ then, it sounds more cosy to me and that's what I need

Re: Pipe Organ library

Don't let the simple black and white text only page fool you, there's much more to this than it looks like - I promise.

Hauptwerk is like a virtual organ, and you can download several free sample sets for it, and there are others that are commercially available (several of the GIGA pipe organ libraries are also available in Hauptwerk format). IMHO, you won't need anything besides the free ones that come with it if you are looking for just a typical "church" pipe organ. It does load all samples into RAM, not streaming from disk, but this yields amazing polyphony. Check out the audio demos, and look in the User Forum for some even nicer demos of what is possible. The great thing about this, is that you have total control over the sound of the organ as you would sitting at a real organ - you can control the "stops" in realtime with midi note events (or Mouseclicks or QWERTY hotkeys.) Though, admittedly, you will need to know a bit about pipe organs to get fantastic results.

I really urge you to check it out, becuase it will yield fantastic restults for you. Despite the demos that pretty much have a set registration for the entire piece, you can add and change stops as you go and make for great dynamic and timbral variation. The way I see it, you can spend your money on one of the GIGA organ libraries and get a handfull or pre-chosen "set-in-stone" registration combinations, or for the same price (or cheaper) you can go with Hauptwerk and have the full organ at your disposal. I will warn you in advance, when I bought this and downloaded the samples the FTP was incredibly slow - hopefully this has changed.

Re: Pipe Organ library

Originally Posted by Aenigma

The way I see it, you can spend your money on one of the GIGA organ libraries and get a handfull or pre-chosen "set-in-stone" registration combinations, or for the same price (or cheaper) you can go with Hauptwerk and have the full organ at your disposal.

The above statement may be true for most conventional Giga libraries but not for the PMI Baroque Organ. We have taken incedible care to avoid the "preselected registration combinations". In fact you can easily create any combination of stops you want with our library, that's how we designed the library from the ground up. See the quoted blurp from our press release below.

I must say that I do believe HAUPTWERK is a very cool app for organ lovers. The human interface and the performance are so cool. Integration with sequencers is a little difficult with virtual midi cables and so on but that should soon change when the new version is released.

The PMI Baroque Organ is the first sampling library for personal computers that chromatically captures all 28 single stops of the church organ and provides all available combinations of the real organ. To achieve this 110 samples for every stop are used. Every single pipe of the organ has been recorded. Beside these single stops several combinations were selected so that all registrations of the original organ are available to the user. Thus PMI makes the sound and power of a real church organ available to every computer owner.

Traditionally, conventional church organ libraries were popular because of their large impressive tutti sounds, usually achieved by providing a limited amount of combinations of many single stops. These libraries lacked the possibility to combine single stops at random, as in the real church organ. Also most church libraries use far less samples for each stop, resulting in unnaturally transposed sounds and strange timbre shifts.

Now these barriers have been broken. The PMI Baroque Organ library offers all the single stops of a church organ and provides all necessary combinations. These combinations are designed to achieve that every combination of the church organ can be assembled without running into polyphony problems on the host computer. This offers a whole new degree of control over the organ sound. The PMI Baroque Organ captures the complete sound of the real church organ, including the ambience of space. Release triggered samples add the natural ambience of the church. The library contains 2.8 Gigabytes of high quality samples and is designed for easy operation. The library can be played live using several midi keyboards as a normal church organ or integrated in an existing sequencer environment.

Over 100 realistic audio demos in high MP3-quality can be found on the PMI website.

The PMI Baroque Organ is available from authorized PMI dealers, directly from PMI on-line at www.postpiano.com. The PMI Baroque Organ ships in March 2004 and carries an MSRP of $145.

Re: Pipe Organ library

Hi!

NDB was born in a bit different philosophy than other libraries. The samples are stops and preselected combinations covering those you often use when performing a piece from the organ literature. The current edition contains 9 GBs of sounds in 35 stops/combis, the next edition, coming in a few weeks, will contain more than 20 GBs.

I think realistic sound is more important than 100% registration freedom, and it is for sure, that nothing can sound more realistic than preselected combinations, compared to stops that are combined after post-processing each of them - just think of the volume of the stops or their coaction in the organ case, which is significant and lost when you just play them back together with a computer (proved by measurements).
What's more, it is still quite a hard job for today's computers to combine a 99-stop tutti from single stops, for example, and it is nearly impossible then to use the organ as an arrangement with other samples as well, like in the case of C. Saint-Saens' organ symphony.

I think getting out a high quality sound of your sampler _easily_ is more important for professional musicians than the theoretical possibility of combining a few common and very uncommon stops, as they can then concentrace really on the piece they are composing/performing and not the technical stuff. (I guess the ease of use is the problem with the huge orchestral libraries too, am I right?)

In my opinion, it is safe to rely on leading concert organists who selected the combis, however: the number of stops/combinations are not infinite. (This is the reason they'll be expanded.)

There is one more thing which is usually not mentioned or thought about: that well-selected combis can be further combined with each other. Just imagine having a combination of Fonds 16' 8' 4' and Anches 16' 8' 4', which could be found on the first pages of almost any C. Franck's sheet. Should you want to have a romantic tutti, you will have to combine these combis. In the case of our sampled organs, this is something like 50-60 stops sounding together, naturally. If you want to do this stop-by-stop, your sampler application will probably suffer high loads, if it can cope with it, and it will not sound that natural.

On the other hand, NDB was (is) the first library, which offers realtime swellbox, tremolo and crescendo effects for GigaStudio. (Small organs won't even have a swellbox.)

However bizarre it first looks, it's not cruicial to sample all pipes or all notes from a stop. There are some stops having very unique notes, with every single note's different sound transient (because of the sound of the valves for example), but there are some, which sounds quite the same in their near neighborhood. We tested with a few people, and even with the organ builder of one of our sampled instruments if they could hear the difference between files having fewer and more samples. Could not. I'm not saying, that comatically sampled instruments won't sound better, but I think that there is a rational limit, where the sound is not affected any more, and adding more samples just results in poor performance and bigger size.